Snowden makes NSA look bad

Eight months after Edward Snowden leaked secrets about the National Security Agency's mass surveillance, The New York Times reports that intelligence officials "have determined that he used inexpensive and widely available software to 'scrape' the National Security Agency’s networks." Really? It took the better part of a year for our crack security teams to figure out how he got the information he leaked?

This revelation comes on top of the news that the intelligence people don't actually know for sure what documents and secrets Snowden took with him when he left the country. The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency said, "Everything that he touched, we assume that he took." I'm no computer whiz, but why can't the DIA do better than just assume something like that?

The security agencies claim they pursue some 5,000 leads a day while preventing any major terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11. That's an incredible record of success, particularly considering their inability to detect Snowden's activities before he fled and their slowness in figuring out his modus operandi.

There's a real contradiction between their perfect ability to stop terrorists and their complete helplessness in stopping a young IT guy. So maybe the real terrorists are not as numerous or as dangerous as the government would have us believe.